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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION: DISNEY TELEVISION

1. Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color: A Chronicle

2. Stories of a Mythic Past

3. Stories of Fact and (Science) Fiction

4. Promoting the Films/Promoting the Parks: Hybrid Stories

Conclusion: The Disneyland/Wonderful World of Color Legacy

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing this book has left me with several large debts. My family most of all—Leigh, Gabby, and Justin—humored me, taped and watched a great number of episodes of Disneyland and The Wonderful World of Color, helped with illustrations for the volume, and even discussed episodes with me, probably beyond all reason. Their support was most important in completing the project.

My colleagues and students at Georgia Tech also have a share in this book. Bob Kolker, a model of the film scholar, consistently encouraged the work, as he has all of my efforts. Other fellow faculty, among them Shannon Dobransky and Carol Senf, graciously endured longwinded commentaries spurred by their most casual references to Disney. And my students, particularly those in the Film and/as Technology course, typically humored me while also asking their usual smart questions.

I am also grateful to Wayne State University Press for giving me the opportunity to lead off their series, and for providing me with a copyeditor, Jennifer Backer, who was both thorough and sensitive to clear and straightforward prose.

It all started with a mouse, Walt Disney was fond of saying, as he tried to acknowledge his studio’s indebtedness to an audience that had developed a surprising fondness for his creation Mickey Mouse. This study, too, began with something small, my own childhood fascination with Disney television, recalled thanks to a passing reference by Barry Grant to a new series he and Jeanette Sloniowski were coediting titled Landmarks in Television. It is to Barry and Jeanette that I am most indebted for getting me started on what has proved to be a most pleasurable bit of research into my own and my cultural past.

INTRODUCTION

Disney Television

In the fifties, the critical mass of baby boomers entered the impressionable preschool and elementary-school ages. And where the baby boom went was where the action would be.

Landon Jones, Great Expectations

Two of the key components of what Landon Jones terms the action of 1950s culture were television and marketing, a nexus that surrounded baby boomers with products created especially for them, spurred new fads aimed expressly at them, and differentiated them from previous generations of Americans by redefining them as spectator-consumers. Just as important, that combination established a pattern that would increasingly typify contemporary America, a world that, for many, seemed to be increasingly disjointed from values and traditions of the past while also becoming media- and market-driven, drawing its tastes from a pervasively mediated environment and even responding to advertisements as if they were entertainment itself. Finding a safe and somewhat stable position amid this action was difficult, since rapid cultural change could lend itself to fads—such as the hula hoop, coonskin cap, finned cars, and the Twist—but fads by their nature burn out quickly, becoming historical curiosities in short order, markers that help measure the more stable elements of culture, as well as its needs and desires.

One of the key cultural markers at both ends of this spectrum was the Disneyland television series, which generated one of the most popular fads of the era and, along with the comforting presence of its host, Walt Disney himself, stood as a symbol of a kind of cultural and indeed psychic stability in this period. Premiering in 1954, Disneyland would undergo various transformations in title—Walt Disney Presents (1958–61), Walt Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color (1961–69), The Wonderful World of Disney (1969–79), Disney’s Wonderful World (1979–81), Walt Disney (1981–83), The Disney Sunday Movie (1986–88), and The Magical World of Disney (1988–90)—shifts in network, and its creator’s death, yet it would also become one of the longest-lived programs in television history. Over the course of twenty-nine years it continuously occupied prime-time viewing slots for each of the major networks, offered audiences family-style programming oriented around a few basic popular themes, and won numerous Emmy and Peabody awards. It was, very simply, a fixture of American television and of family viewing habits during the pioneering decade of the 1950s and for many decades after, although it also started at least a few of the cultural fads noted above. Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color (arguably the series’ two most commonly used and best recognized titles) was, consequently, a key site for the sort of nexus described above, as well as a point of stability from which we can see its development. For the first of the baby boomers, the Disneyland series was indeed where the action was and a model for the institutionalization of that junction of entertainment and marketing that has become such a recognizable element of the contemporary media experience.¹

Even prior to television’s movement into this arena, Walt Disney had recognized that nexus and had begun to capitalize on it. In the 1930s with his small film studio desperate for cash to support its animation projects as well as his own dreams of expansion, Walt and his brother Roy licensed the likeness of their star, Mickey Mouse, to a variety of commercial vendors. Reflecting the fast-growing popularity of Disney’s cinematic creations, sales for those licensed products—tablets, handkerchiefs, sleepwear, toys, even Mickey Mouse–embossed ice cream cones—quickly exceeded all expectations. Probably the best-known example of that impact is the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company contract with Disney, which, although executed at the height of the depression, resulted in sales of two and a half million Mickey Mouse watches in just two years. Equally noteworthy is the agreement allowing the Lionel Corporation to produce a Mickey and Minnie Mouse handcar on tracks, the sales of which are credited with helping Lionel not only to overcome bankruptcy but also to gain a leading position in the toy market (Thomas 107–08). Under the guidance of advertising executive Herman (Kay) Kamen, Disney in this period licensed the use of the mouse and other characters to more than seventy-five manufacturers in the United States, forty-five in England, twenty in Canada, six in France, and six in Spain and Portugal, a move that produced annual sales of over $100 million (Watts 148) within a decade, while helping to sustain the parent company’s film activity. The action, even at this point in the twentieth century, was already beginning to shift to a nexus of entertainment and advertisement and in the process anticipated the baby boom generation that would find part of its identity in this combination and that would help propel Disney to its place as a contemporary entertainment and cultural phenomenon.

More than simply establishing another source for capital, though, this accentuation on combining entertainment and merchandising also helped spur the worldwide popularity of Disney’s films and affected the company’s entire production process. Certainly, this thrust marked the beginning of a fruitful symbiosis—of product and marketing, of mass entertainment and personal consumer experience—that would increasingly come to identify the company, to mark its singular place in American culture as the primary and most successful example of the entertainment-marketing conglomerate, and later to script the terms for the company’s entry into television and other mass media.² In fact, by the late 1930s, as Steven Watts notes, merchandising and its planning had already become an intrinsic part of the moviemaking process (149) at Disney, with Snow White (1937), the company’s first feature, also its first product to implement this new strategy from the outset. Thanks to its previous licensing experience, Disney already had a complete merchandising campaign in place when Snow White opened, involving arrangements with over seventy companies for such goods as records, books, cutlery, toys, and a range of clothing items, including hats, dresses, and underwear. For Watts, a key result of this mixing of family-oriented entertainment with an intense emphasis on merchandising was that even at this early stage in his career, the studio’s head, Disney the modernist, the populist, and the prophet of abundance appeared on the same stage, indistinguishable (163). Not simply another entertainment mogul like those who at the time ruled the movie industry—Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Lewis B. Mayer—Walt Disney was emerging as a harbinger and even a symbol of America’s future, as someone who not only sold the culture a cinematic product (in both traditional and nontraditional ways) but was helping to create what Paul Virilio has lately termed a cinematic reality that we would all inhabit.

I briefly sketch Disney’s industrial background to establish a cultural context out of which one of its most important developments, one that has had a lasting impact on the American entertainment industry and our cultural environment, would not only emerge but become practically inevitable. Disney television, which has taken a great variety of forms—numerous specials, wildly successful series such as Zorro (ABC, 1957–59) and The Mickey Mouse Club (ABC, 1955–59), The Disney Sunday Movie series (ABC, 1989), various Disney products for Saturday morning cartoon time, and especially the Disney Channel—would deliberately capitalize on this model for success, while Disney’s longest-running and most influential series, Disneyland/The Wonderful World of Color, would lay its foundation on this model to become a landmark of the early television era. In fact, we might argue that because of its impact on the film industry, on American viewing habits, on the shape of the television industry, and on the changing nature of mass culture entertainment, Disneyland is one of the most influential series in the history of American television.

When Disneyland premiered in 1954, the American film industry was in what might be described as a crisis, due particularly to government action against its traditional structure and to the changing entertainment habits of postwar America. The Supreme Court’s Paramount Decision of 1948 had ordered the breakup of the monopolistic structure